Narayanan Hariharasastry
It was in the late 1940s when as a boy, all of twelve, I was returning home from our school playground at the gloaming hour, I noticed an incident of sorts happening on one of the roads in the Salem District where traffic was thin with cycles and a few (Tangaas) single-horse-drawn carts, the one and only mode of conveyance for the general public let alone, motor cars that were quite few and far between.
As darkness began descending, I stirred up my stumps only to chance upon an incident where a single-horse-drawn cart also moving in the same direction as mine lurching with the occupants in it jostling against each other and shouting at the cart driver to stop.. In next to no time, the horse got detached from the cart that tumbled down the edge of the road with its harness unfastening itself. The animal stood steady on the road with its blinkers in place.
A few good Samaritans from the handful of pedestrians around, rushed to the men and women lying at the edge of the road and helped them to rise and stand. They were lucky to have come out unscathed but for a slight bruise on the elbow of one of them. When the cart-driver who also escaped unhurt was harnessing the animal to the cart, one from among the skit of people around them hurried to a nearby house, returned soon with a jugful of water for the victims of the mishap to drink. Thanking every one of those around, they got back into the cart and proceeded their way. With the jaws of darkness devouring the brightness of the day, I traced my steps back home.
Years later, once when I was riding my bike on a national highway at the crepuscular hour in the northeast, I alighted on an incident where a private bus that was running ahead of me, turning aside suddenly and rolling down the damp, muddy edge of the road and lying careened with the whole caboodle of passengers, the conductor and the man at the wheel, together with the personal belongings of everyone thrown out and lying scattered, noticed or unnoticed by the passengers in the other speeding vehicles running at a rate of knots.
Standing my bike beside me, on the layby, I stood watching the bloodcurdling incident, hair standing on end. Tour de suite, a crowd of people from the rural areas I saw rushing to the scene of the accident, for -------hold your breath! -------not rescuing the victims but plundering whatever they could get their hands on, even amidst the wails and groans of those writhing between life and death that were falling into their deaf ears. The cries of some of those in the throes of death failed to evoke pity in them. Given the nightfall growing fast, I rode back to my house that I was renting as a technical supervisor in a private company.
Commiserating with those hapless, helpless victims of the accident, I imagined how miserable the situation would have been, had it occurred in this cellphone era when onlookers rush to the scenes of accident to click photos of such sights on their cellphones and post them on the numerous social media.